The Basics Section

To get started in Play By Email gaming,
you'll need the following items on your PC:

Some form of email. This is hard to
avoid in this society, but some of you may be less wired than others. Try Hotmail, Juno, Yahoo, etc. We will refer to your email as
"turn transport system" because we like to speak in high-falutin' terms for
simple concepts.

Alternatively, you may wish to use an
ALTERNATIVE METHOD of turn transport. Check out the Alternative Methods page.

Some form of tracking game progress.
In my opinion, the many game utilities available today (Cyberboard, ADC, etc.) are the
best visual method to graphically track counter movement. However, in the final
analysis, you don't even need these. You could track a game on a
spreadsheet, or even a text document. You just need something that can be
sent from one player to the next, that can show the change in game state to both players.

Some form of executing the game mechanics.
Usually this is a dice roll. Many utilties have die rollers included; there
are also external web based services that will send you die rolls via email. Here
are two of them:

Most of all, you need to own the paper version of the
game. None of this stuff will work unless you have a copy of the rulebook
that you obtained legally!! Publishers get pretty riled, pretty quick, about what they can
define as copyright infringement. DON'T post rules on the web, unless you wrote
them, or have the publisher/authors' explicit permission to do so. I make a point
NOT to include combat resolution charts or any game mechanics on my gamesets; thus you
won't be able to play unless you have the original rulebook in some form.

If you need help using a product, contact the programmer's
website to see if he has any pages up devoted to newbies. You may check here; I try
to keep this site up to date for newcomers. I've also written a HOW TO SETUP AND PLAY A CYBERBOARD PBeM
GAME that some people find useful.

If you are cruising for PBeM opponents, There are MANY places
to go on the web (start with Web Grognards,
searching on the game you'd like to play). I've mentioned a few on the Player to Player page, and even started my own list.